Gaming devices such as slot machines generate billions of dollars of revenue per year for casinos located in the United States and other countries. Typically, a casino generates well over half of its revenue from gaming devices. The profit a casino realizes from a player playing at a gaming device tends to increase as the duration of the player's play session at the gaming device increases. Accordingly, casinos are acutely interested in increasing the duration of a player's play session at a gaming device. Unfortunately most players who play a gaming device have limited funds or a fixed budget, which tends to limit the duration of the play session. Most players would welcome the opportunity to increase the amount of funds they have available for playing the gaming device and/or to offset any losses they may have incurred while playing the gaming device. Further, a player's attention is typically focused on the gaming device the player is playing, making the player susceptible to respond to any offers that may be presented to the player via the gaming device.
The acquisition of new customers and the inducement of the return of previous customers is a key concern for most businesses. Businesses tend to set a monetary budget to be spent on the achievement of these goals. This budget is typically spent on advertising of the business to potential customers. However, the effectiveness of most advertising (even targeted advertising) is less than ideal. This is partly due to the fact that most people are typically bombarded with a multitude of advertisements for a variety of businesses at any given time. Adding to the lack of satisfactory effectiveness of conventional advertising is the fact that many people are presented with advertisements at a time when they are not sufficiently motivated to act on the advertisement (e.g. by purchasing the product or visiting the merchant being advertised). Further, even if the viewer of the advertisement is interested in the subject of the advertisement, the viewer tends to get distracted and forget about acting on the advertisement as time passes. Thus a need exists for an improved method for businesses to acquire new customer and/or induce the return of previous customers.